Sharon Zardetto has been writing about the Macintosh professionally since 1984, including nearly a thousand articles in Macintosh magazines and over 20 books. She’s best known for writing several editions of The Macintosh Bible, along with The Mac Almanac.

Take Control of Fonts in Leopard

This book has been replaced by Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard.

This ebook is no longer for sale. It has been replaced with Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard, which covers both Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. Buy that ebook instead.

More Info

"What a splendid guide! Zardetto seems to sense exactly what you might need to know at just the right moment, but yet does not overwhelm you with a lot of detail all at once." —DFT, reviewing the Tiger edition

Read this ebook to learn the answers to questions such as:

What’s new with fonts and Font Book in Leopard?

What types of fonts can I use with Leopard?

How does automatic font activation work?

In what order does Leopard access fonts from all their possible locations?

How can I figure out what characters are available in a Unicode font?

Which fonts can I remove from my system safely?

How can I best organize the fonts stored on my Mac?

What is the logic and organization for Adobe’s various CS products?

How are fonts from Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 stored?

How should I handle fonts from Apple’s iLife and iWork suites?

How can I minimize font trouble when sharing documents across platforms?

What aspects of using fonts have changed between Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.5.5?

"I am always astonished by Sharon Zardetto’s ability to explain the most complex topics in the most user-friendly way."
—musiclover88, reviewing the Tiger edition

What's New

What Was New in Version 1.0

There were many changes from the Tiger edition of this book to version 1.0 of the Leopard edition, both large and small. The large side:

Leopard includes new fonts and new versions of old fonts, and it has swapped some fonts between the Library and System Fonts folders (to their more logical locations); it also installs all foreign language fonts by default instead of as an option, just the opposite of Tiger’s approach. Updated tables in Appendix B: Leopard Font Tables identify all the fonts. The fonts Leopard has in common with Microsoft Office 2004 leapfrogged Office 2004’s versions (which were superior to Tiger’s), leading to a rewrite of the section about organizing your fonts; if you use Office 2004, make sure you check Office 2004 and Leopard’s Multiple-File Fonts.

Font Book has a super new feature that can automatically activate a font if it’s used in a document you’re opening; check out Enable Automatic Font Activation. It also prints font samples (finally!), covered in the aptly named Print Font Samples.

On the smaller side, Leopard’s general (not font-specific) changes required modifications of or additions to many sections. For example:

With the Finder’s icon preview and Cover Flow view, you don’t need to open Font Book to see what a font look likes; see Preview Fonts in the Finder.

Spotlight is not only faster under Leopard, but it also provides new ways of searching, so Find Misplaced Fonts was revised.

I should also note what’s missing from this version compared to the Tiger edition:

Information about dealing with corrupted font caches—because Leopard doesn’t use font caches, except on a much deeper level, where they rarely become corrupted.

The Classic environment isn’t supported under Leopard, so information about updating “legacy” fonts, and running the venerable Font/DA Mover program under Classic to repack suitcases has been dropped. For more details, see my TidBITS article, “Are Your Fonts Ready for Leopard?.”

What’s New in Version 1.1

The changes in this version include:

Microsoft Office 2008 uses an approach to font storage different from its predecessor, so a new section, Deal with Microsoft Fonts, shows you how to organize not only the 20o8 fonts, but also how to get rid of the 2004 leftovers. Also, some Microsoft fonts were updated to match Leopard’s versions, so I made appropriate minor changes to various tables and tips.

Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 and 4 both take a different font-storage approach from their forebears, so a new section, Deal with Adobe-Product Fonts , describes how to not only deal with CS3-4’s font collections, but how to combine either one with CS2’s fonts, which, surprisingly enough, include some fonts that the later versions do not.

Since I’m paying so much attention to third-party fonts and how to handle them, it’s only fair that I added advice about dealing with fonts from Apple’s iLife and iWork, in Identify and Winnow iLife/iWork Fonts .

Minor updates to Leopard have included unannounced changes to some of the little things—such as how Spotlight searches for fonts, so I’ve once again updated Find Misplaced Fonts .

With nearly 30 additional pages of font-handling information added to this edition, something had to give; in fact, several somethings: “Solve Basic Font Problems,” “Synchronize with the Rest of the World,” and “The Zapf Dingbats and Symbol Nightmare.” Because those sections were about solving problems, they’ve been moved into a new companion book, Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard.

FAQ

Does this ebook cover third-party font-management utilities?

Due to space constraints and a concern for timeliness, the ebook doesn’t review font management software or round up the dozens of font-related shareware utilities; instead, it discusses what to look for in font management beyond the tools that Apple provides, and it highlights a few especially good shareware utilities in context of related topics.

Does this book cover how to enter characters from Asian languages?

Mac OS X does provide special input methods for these languages; this book doesn’t cover those special methods, but you can check out the basics at several Web sites, including the one at http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/.

Update Plans

August 2010 – This ebook has been replaced by a new edition, Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard. This new edition merges Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard information with 10.6 Snow Leopard information, plus has newer information about Adobe CS5 fonts and a few other small improvements. (The differences in font handling between Leopard and Snow Leopard are quite small.)

Managing fonts in Mac OS X is all too often like herding cats (all those Fonts folders!), but you can now corral your serif and sans-serif felines with our new Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard. Written by Sharon Zardetto, this 225-page ebook covers not only everything you need to know about fonts in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.5 Leopard, but also special font situations in software such as Adobe CS4 and CS5, Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008, iLife, and iWork.

Important topics covered include:

Where your fonts reside and in what order they load, and what - if anything - you should do about it

The ins and outs of different font installation methods

Using Font Book to manage, validate, and organize fonts

Making the most of character-rich Unicode fonts

Using Apple’s Character Palette/Viewer and Keyboard Viewer to insert and explore special characters

The quirks of fonts from Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008, and which ones you should keep around

Organizing fonts from Adobe CS2, CS3, CS4, and CS5 so they are available where you need them

The ebook costs $15 and includes a coupon worth 20% off on any purchase from Ergonis Software, makers of the font utility PopChar X and other software.

Ebook reader G.M. recently wrote in to tell us about his experience shopping with MyFonts.com, one of the vendors that Sharon recommends in her various Take Control ebooks about fonts. He wrote, “I have purchased numerous fonts through this site over the past several years. They have a policy (which may apply to only some vendors, but perhaps to all) of providing notices about free updates to any fonts that you have purchased. The most surprising such update came not too long ago for a font family (Rayuela) which had been upgraded with several additional weights, all of which was free, even though those weights did not exist when I purchased the family several years ago. Kudos to this online vendor.”

Sharon Zardetto, author of this ebook, recently stumbled on the Font Conference video at the CollegeHumor Web site. By mid-way through watching it, I was laughing so hard I was crying, and I nearly fell out of my chair. If you need a laugh, and you know your way around the basic typefaces, check it out!